GOP shows newfound love for payday-lending bill
FThomas Suddes
or 405 days, the bipartisan payday-loan reform bill sponsored by a Springfield Republican and a Toledo Democrat was stuck in an Ohio House committee. On Wednesday, the committee, without changing a word that the sponsors had proposed, approved the bill. That’s good news for hard-pressed Ohioans.
Bottom line: Ohio’s House will soon pass Reps. Kyle Koehler, R-Springfield, and Mike Ashford’s (D-Toledo) House Bill 123. Then the Senate very likely will send the Koehler-Ashford reform bill to Gov. John Kasich’s desk, because a hot potato is a hot potato.
As approved by the committee, the Koehler-Ashford bill is a big plus for borrowers, Nick Bourke, director of Pew Charitable Trusts’ consumer finance project, said in a statement. Nationally, the Pew trusts are leading advocates of payday-loan reform.
“The movement by … the Government Accountability and Oversight Committee to advance H.B. 123 to the House floor is a promising sign for Ohioans who have waited far too long to see practical reforms that will bring down the prices of the state’s high-cost payday loans,” Bourke said. “This bill contains a range of important consumer safeguards and closes a loophole that for a decade has allowed payday lenders to charge Ohio families the highest rates in the nation.”
Did the Statehouse Republicans who run the Ohio House’s Government Accountability and Oversight Committee have a pro-consumer conversion last week, kind of like St. Paul en route to Damascus? No. But there is this thing called self-protection. A federal investigation of possible Statehouse wrongdoing sparked the midmonth resignation of Republican House Speaker Cliff Rosenberger of Clinton County’s Clarksville. And that spooked the House’s remaining 65 Republicans.
In fairness, the upstanding men and women who belong to the Ohio House’s GOP caucus would never, ever, have stalled, let alone gutted, the KoehlerAshford bill to please the Statehouse’s payday-loan lobby. But alas, cynics, like the poor, are always with us.
So, lest anyone doubt House Republicans’ clean hands and good intentions, the Accountability and Oversight panel, chaired by Rep. Louis Blessing, a suburban Cincinnati Republican, approved the payday-loan bill with just one “no” vote.
Among committee members voting “yes”: Rep. Ryan Smith of Gallia County’s Bidwell, who wants to become the House’s next speaker. (Smith’s rival: Rep. Larry Householder, a Republican from Perry County’s Glenford, who was House speaker from 2001 through 2004.) The committee’s only “no” vote on H.B. 123 came from Rep. Bill Seitz, a suburban Cincinnati Republican.
OK, yes, it took Blessing’s committee about 58 weeks to review a 17-page bill. But, hey, that was just careful lawmaking, wasn’t it?
Former Speaker Rosenberger was age 33 when he was elected speaker in January 2015. A few bystanders thought Rosenberger might have been the youngest person elected speaker of Ohio’s House. The list of speakers (back to 1803, when Ohio joined the Union) remains to be fully checked.
But at least two Ohio House speakers elected after 1900 were younger than Rosenberger was when he was elected. House Speaker C. William O’Neill, a Marietta Republican, was 30 when elected to preside over the House in January 1947. And House Speaker Freeman Eagleson, a Cambridge Republican, was 31 when elected in January 1908.
O’Neill was elected attorney general in 1950 then, in 1956, governor — the last Ohio governor to serve a two-year term. Republicans’ 1958 Right to Work (for Less) fiasco, which produced a Democratic landslide, led voters to replace O’Neill with Toledo Democrat Michael DiSalle. Right to Work (for Less) also unseated a Republican senator (John Bricker), a Republican attorney general (William Saxbe) and a Republican state treasurer (Roger Tracy, father of the late Franklin County politico).
O’Neill won an Ohio Supreme Court seat in 1960. In 1970, he was appointed to an unexpired term as chief justice by Republican Gov. James Rhodes. O’Neill subsequently was elected chief justice. He’s the only Ohioan to have been House speaker, governor and Supreme Court chief justice. O’Neill died in 1978 and is buried in Marietta’s Oak Grove Cemetery.